Will Nonviolent Protest Spark a ‘Palestinian Spring’?

It is a now famous story: A young Arab man, fed up with the injustices of life under a military regime, decides he’s had enough. By demonstrating his readiness to die to protest these injustices, the man powerfully asserts his own humanity and that of millions of his compatriots. His dramatic display of self-sacrifice inspires millions and his name becomes known across the Middle East and beyond.

The man in this story is Khader Adnan, a 33 year-old Palestinian baker and father of two from the West Bank town of Jenin, who narrowly escaped death last week after an unprecedented 66-day hunger strike to protest his detention without charge by the Israeli military. 

Israeli authorities detained Adnan on December 17, 2011, exactly one year after a 26 year-old Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest his treatment at the hands of callous government officials. As the world now knows, Bouazizi’s action triggered what has become known as the “Arab Spring” – a revolution in Tunisia and a wave of rebellion across the region, leading (thus far) to the ouster of four Arab dictators and threatening a fifth.

It is too early to tell whether Adnan’s act of defiance is a sign of a budding “Palestinian Spring,” but evidence of Palestinian discontent and mass mobilization have been percolating throughout the past year. Since last spring, several bold, albeit short-lived, protest movements have sprung up in opposition to the ongoing division within the Palestinian Authority between Fatah and Hamas, as well as against continuing Israeli occupation. More recently, Palestinians have begun to organize protests against the tentative (and largely farcical) peace talks being held in Amman.